If Bitcoin is not "up"graded to centralization, then it withers on the vine because the ideological delusion was that we were going to scale this out to every human in the world. If we "down"grade to a hobbiest store-of-value then the network effects that allow us to exchange Bitcoins for other things fall away.
You are conflating quantity of users with quality.
I'd rather the richest 1% (who own 95% of world assets) use Bitcoin, and exclude the 99% of poorer people, than the reverse.
Poor people have no need for a store of value, as they have little or no value to store (much less the ability to manage their stored wealth wisely).
There are plenty of less crowded and expensive blockchains for poor nerds with an on-chain tx fetish.
Bitcoin The Technology scales to "every human in the world" in the form of sidechains, altcoins, and institutions kept honest via realtime auditing.
Bitcoin the Premium Limited Edition 21e6 Cryptocurrency does not. Like fine art, gold, and real estate, its distribution will follow Pareto-type power laws.
This bleeding heart desire to press Actual Bitcoins into the open palm of every yuppie at Starbucks and every child in Africa is misguided.
We will keep Bitcoin elite, whether you and TBTB like it or not.
The blockchain is being centralized in numerous vectors, so even limiting block size won't stop the Sybil attack takeover by pools, the capture of > 50% of the hashrate with the 21 Inc buiness model, the centralization into ASIC farms with usury and access to low priced or collective subsidized electricity (make the people pay for their own enslavement with subsidies).
The sidechains will be Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc.. and they will have the most users. So go ahead and fork away and see how many people follow you. The richest 0.1% are onboard the NWO plan and will prefer to monopolize the MSM fork than to defect to your ideological, hobbiest store-of-value. Who are your allies? Where is your market?
That is why I identified a fledgling market which can grow larger than the NWO economy within a couple of decades.
Realize whether you increase or not the block size, the centralization of (any MSM fork of) Bitcoin is unavoidable.
If you want a different outcome, you need a different experiment and target market. That is what I am doing. You can join if you want to succeed. Or not. I don't care.